Every day there are more than 13,000 people whose treatment has been completed who are still in hospitals in England, the latest figures from NHS England suggest. Plus there are a further 4,000 around the rest of the UK – which means around one in eight beds are occupied by people who don’t necessarily need to be there.<\/p>\n
Many of these “delayed discharge” patients are older and may be frail and living with multiple health conditions who need support in the community.<\/p>\n
But it comes at a huge cost. The average hospital bed takes \u00a3562 a day to staff and maintain, according to NHS England, meaning the health service in England is losing more than \u00a3225m a month supporting patients who could be elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Then there is the cost to other patients. <\/p>\n
“We are seeing surgery cancelled and long waits in A&E because there are no beds available on the wards,” says Clifford Kilgore, a senior nurse working with older people, who serves on the Nurses and Allied Health Professionals’ Council of the British Geriatrics Society.<\/p>\n
As for the staff there is a toll on morale, too – among doctors, nurses and ambulance workers. “It’s terrible when you see patients go downhill in hospital when you know they would be better off somewhere else,” says Laura Hichens, a nurse who leads the “discharge liaison” team at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every day there are more than 13,000 people whose treatment has been completed who are still in hospitals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-365348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}